Communication and Digital Emotions. the Desire of Community as a Dimension of the Existence

Abstract

According to Ong (1986), for a long time, in the human history, direct or vis-à-vis communication has been the only modality of communication; traditions have essentially been oral and their survival depended on the continuous renewal, which was represented by the vis-à-vis narration of stories and activities. In this way, the oral culture has created some expedients to remind and let people remind some aspects: a certain structure of the speech (fixed themes, formulas, proverbs, rhythmic style, etc.), a particular kind of (narrative) speech, a specific behavioral schematization (“strong” characters, types). The communication process is always a fundamental and essential process (Wright, 1976): it involves individuals in a deep relationship inside which the linguistic and paralinguistic codes, which come into play, take on complex meanings. In fact, despite the apparent facility through which two or more people come into contact among them, the deep sense of communication is something which is complicated and mysterious. Each person, who is involved in the communication process, attributes, on the basis of his/her subjective and social-group existential experience, his/her own meaning to each sign. According to Wolton (2006), communication has to do with four dimensions, which are complementary among them: first of all, communication is the ideal of expression and exchange which is at the origin of the Western culture and of democracy; talking about democracy presumes, as a basic concept, the existence of free and equal individuals. Communication concerns also those media which have remarkably transformed the relationships between communication and society. Still, communication concerns the whole mechanism of the new technologies that, with information science, telecommunications, audiovisuals and their interconnection, have globally modified the premises of the exchange of messages and power. In the end, communication includes also all those values, those symbols and those representations which function as a mechanism for the functioning of the public space, of democracies and of the international community through information and media.